Susan Frenk (Essay Date 1996)

SOURCE: Frenk, Susan. "The Wandering Text: Situating the Narratives of Isabel Allende." In Latin American Women's Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, edited by Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, pp. 66-84. Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon, 1996.

In the following essay, Frenk considers the gender-based, socioeconomic, and political motivations for feminism in Allende's fiction.

Negotiating a path through the critical geographies which have mapped the academic reception of the narratives and public personae of Isabel Allende is a disorienting experience indeed. For all their differences, however, most of these geographies participate in a general deterritorialization as they steer her texts down unmarked roads. This essay offers a reading of the faded signposts and diversion signs along the way, with a tentative sketch for an alternative journey.

Texts are produced and exchanged in a global market-place. In the process a woman, some women, come...